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What are you, throwing up random Bellman/CatForce results? We are looking for the persistent - the catalysts that stay perfectly intact after the interaction - as well as the simple and glider-cheap. This last one of yours satisfies none of the conditions. P.S. the following reply demonstrates unfettered stupidity.

Last edited by Freywa on October 3rd, 2015, 12:33 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It isn't promising, because the tub doesn't catalyze anything - it's destroyed almost immediately after the reaction hits it. There's a small chance that it could be made transparent by using catalysts around it, but I think that'd be unlikely.

Speaking of unlikely transparent catalysts, has anyone searched if a loaf could be restored after executing its highway-robbing reaction (that is, without Herschels as in dvgrn's highway robber)? I've had a few close calls in extendedlife, but nothing that actually works (and, of course, nothing that would work in regular Life); I have a feeling that a highway-robbing Snark would be super useful.

Gustavo6046 wrote:So what can I do from the last partial G-to-B? It was so promising!

You'll have to spend some time looking at conduits that actually work, to understand why your partial G-to-B is really not very promising at all. If you re-read everyone's recent comments carefully, that might really help also. I'd say that all those comments are correct except for the small-text comment that Freywa added, which seems unnecessary and just plain rude.

There are (at least) thousands of combinations of two still lifes that produce a B-heptomino plus a lot of active junk.

Any of those thousands -- just like yours -- could just barely possibly be catalyzed with Bellman or ptbsearch or catgl, so that both still lifes reappear in exactly the right location. If something like that is found, it will be a wonderful discovery.

However:

Running a search to put two "bait" still lifes back in place is enormously harder than putting one still life back.

You can find single small still lifes that produce a B-heptomino when you hit them with a glider. So a reaction that destroys or moves two objects is definitely a step in the wrong direction. That only makes a difficult problem exponentially harder.

Here's another way to say it: there are other untested reactions that are millions of times more likely to be solvable. So if people are going to spend time searching, they'll look at those reactions, not at the ones you're posting.

These are not easy problems to solve. For most people it takes hours of time, and that includes careful use of a dedicated search program. You might solve one of them by accident in five minutes, but I'm afraid the odds are very heavily against you!

So... if you want to make the case that this particular reaction is "promising", it's important that you do your job, run those search programs for a few days or weeks or years, and actually find a specific solution that makes the tub and block reappear.

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Let's try another example. Suppose I make up another partial G-to-B that's about as "promising" as the last "original" reaction you posted:

Again, there are millions of things like this out there. This one took about half a minute to find. Notice all the similarities:

• Glider goes in, glider comes out (could be promising so far...)
• One still life gets rotated and moved a little distance (oops, very bad)
• One still life disappears and is not replaced (oops again, very very bad)

Those last two problems would have to be solved first, before this reaction could be thought of as a signal-processing conduit. Until then, it's just random noise with a few not-very-interesting coincidences. Even though the above pattern also has

• Clean B-heptomino/Herschel signal comes out (big bonus!)

that "big bonus" doesn't matter at all. The reaction is still completely unworkable as a conduit, without some kind of magical fix. Bellman and ptbsearch can provide a little magic, maybe, but not nearly that much (in most cases).

M. I. Wright wrote:Speaking of unlikely transparent catalysts, has anyone searched if a loaf could be restored after executing its highway-robbing reaction (that is, without Herschels as in dvgrn's highway robber)?... I have a feeling that a highway-robbing Snark would be super useful.

It sure would -- might make it possible to "rescue" signals that it's not currently possible to get hold of -- like using a tandem-glider transmitter as a signal splitter, and so on.

For people without the ExtendedLife rule installed, here's the reaction in question, with the usual fishhook catalyst shown on the left:

I was never too tempted by this as a search target for a highway-robbing Snark, because almost all of the area where catalysts can be placed is in the middle of the highway, so to speak. So it would probably turn into a regular Snark pretty quickly.

Not that that would be so bad -- a new Snark might change the glider color, or at least have a different output timing. It would be really nice to be able to control exactly when a glider arrives at a target, just by swapping out a few Snarks.

Depends on what you're interested in. New discoveries aren't usually very low-hanging these days, though no doubt there are still occasional exceptions... but if anyone could tell you for sure where those exceptions are, those discoveries would have been made already.

There are always plenty of things that have "never been done before" in terms of constructions, though. What did you think of the suggestion about making the World's First Ever Glider-to-Loafer Converter, for example?

With enough practice, you could eventually turn that into Gustavo's Highly Optimized Smallest Known Glider-to-Loafer Converter in the History of the Universe*. But you don't seem to have tried out the Optimization Game much yet. Maybe none of this is what you're really interested in learning about, and that's certainly fine.

Also, just to clarify:

Even a really good G-to-loafer might not really need its own LifeWiki entry... It would be good to add a paragraph about on the Loafer page, anyway, I would think. But discoverers don't usually write about their own discoveries, so somebody else should probably to do the writing.

* Let's just assume for now that there's no competition from Life enthusiasts on other planets or in other galaxies, until we have the resources to do a thorough survey.

I would say, it's quite unlikely (not to say absolutely impossible) to find something like that. Why did you choose this particular generation and this particular offset? You don't know which reaction you had in mind, do you?

Also when you search for catalysts of glider-triggered reactions with Bellman, you normally need a target (a still life or a blinker) that has a chance to be restored (take a look at snark.in). Also note that the snark was not found at random, that reaction had been known long before, but it consumed a block.

Gustavo6046 wrote:Anyway, this is promising...
non-catalysed LWSS-to-G.
The boat becomes a loaf, very good, plus the glider, which I need obviously, and the loaf isn't in the way of the reaction but in the side when it appear, like the boat.

Right -- definitely this is not as difficult to repair as many of your previous discoveries.

People have been building LWSS-to-G converters for many years, and have even done it by crashing an LWSS into a boat, then rebuilding it. Here's one that I put together a dozen years ago:

It used to take a lot of conduits to route a signal around to exactly the right place to rebuild the boat.

It's not likely that you'll be able to catalyze your new reaction to turn the loaf back into a boat. That's only likely to work if you have a lot of options to try. In this case there aren't enough good places to put the catalysts.

In fact there are only about two ticks after the glider appears and before the loaf stabilizes. If you add a catalyst too soon, both the glider and the loaf will end up getting catalyzed into something else. It might theoretically work, but the odds of a boat re-crystallizing in that exact right place are very very small. Basically it's not worth looking for it.

However:

There is a big potential for a new discovery here, if you can just get rid of the loaf completely, and send a signal around to rebuild the boat. We have a lot more stable Herschel tracks and other elementary conduits available now than we did back in 2003, so the odds are quite good that you can build something smaller than that 2003 LWSS-to-G.

1) Can you place a block or an eater in a place where the loaf will be cleanly destroyed? If so, then you're down to one problem to be solved -- the missing boat.

2) Can you place a Herschel-to-boat converter in a place where the boat can be rebuilt, without the converter getting in the way of the incoming LWSS? Try this:

If you're really lucky (or have a little help from Hersrch) the output of your LWSS-to-G will line up with the input of the syringe, and you'll have a complete LWSS-to-G that's smaller and faster than the smallest one currently known.

I would've said that that isn't promising, since again, the tub gets destroyed.
However, the spark that destroys the tub happens to be perfectly symmetrical - meaning that an Eater 3 can be used in place of it. With the help of a catalyst block, it becomes a memory cell, or a 'two-stage' H->G that releases a different glider on each input according to its parity:

There are definitely a few known period triplers, but there's nothing three-stage that puts out gliders in three different directions -- see the multipliers thread. In fact, I don't think that there was even an elementary period doubler that sent gliders in alternate directions, until now!

Composite alternating doublers are easy -- just add semi-Snarks to a H-to-2G. Alternating quadruplers are also simple chains of two semi-Snarks attached to a H-to-4G. An alternating tripler would be a little bigger, because you'd need syringes:

Gustavo6046 wrote:What is a semi-Snark? It seems useful. A half snark?

About the semi-snark: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=279&p=8385#p8383
I recommend you to search LifeWiki when you encounter unknown words. It contains explanations for pretty most of the words in Life. (But I'm pretty surprised to see that semi-snark wasn't the case.)

Gustavo6046 wrote:I need a edge-reflector that isn't in the way of the glider. Maybe a big beacon.

Well, what you are referring to seems to be a highway robber (search it in LifeWiki and the forums), but what are you going to do with it?